Riots

A survey published today by “advanced surveillance solutions” company Synetic has claimed that following this summer’s riots, public attitudes towards CCTV have warmed and people want to see more cameras on the streets. This is hardly surprising. As the police this week acknowledged, their response to the riots was fundamentally flawed by a lack of officers. As […]

Writing on The Commentator, I argue that the police don’t need new powers, they need a new approach. “Both Coalition parties repeatedly highlighted the proliferation of criminal offences and new powers introduced by the last government, and how such an approach made the police’s work harder by ‘rewriting the rule book’ repeatedly. Less than 18 […]

In the aftermath of the London riots, there has been a range of ‘interesting’ ideas around social media and digital communications. Today’s Times carries one such example – Westminster council is to set up a ‘gang information desk‘ to monitor and report suspicious activity on-line. It’s not clear if they will be monitoring only public information […]

We’ve learned several lessons from CCTV in recent weeks and the desired and actual effects of it on social behaviour. This weekend, rugby player Mike Tindall was shown in a questionable situation on CCTV footage from a club in New Zealand. Thousands of hours of CCTV footage during the UK riots have been scoured by […]

Since the riots across the UK, there have been a number of suggestions as to how the police and the government could respond to resolve the issues still simmering on the surface and prevent them in the future. Among these are limiting social media (which we’ve discussed at length here, here and here, among others), monitoring […]